Obama no healer of our nation's angst

President Barack Obama, kicking off his 2012 campaign at a rally at Virginia Commonwealth University on May 5, 2012 in Richmond, Va. (Sara D. Davis, Getty)

"The pundits like to slice and dice our country into red states and blue states … "

Barack Obama, rising star, Democratic convention, 2004

WASHINGTON — Poor Solicitor General Donald Verrilli. Once again he's been pilloried for fumbling a historic Supreme Court case. First shredded for his "train wreck" defense of Obamacare's individual mandate, he is now blamed for the defenestration in oral argument of President Barack Obama's challenge to the Arizona immigration law.

The law allows police to check the immigration status of someone stopped for other reasons. Verrilli claimed that constitutes an intrusion on the federal monopoly on immigration enforcement. He was pummeled. Why shouldn't a state help the federal government enforce the law? "You can see it's not selling very well," said Justice Sonia Sotomayor.

But Verrilli never had a chance. This was never a serious legal challenge in the first place. It was confected (and timed) purely for political effect, to highlight immigration as a campaign issue with which to portray Republicans as anti-Hispanic.

Hispanics are just the beginning, however. The entire Obama campaign is a slice-and-dice operation, pandering to one group after another, particularly those that elected Obama in 2008 — blacks, Hispanics, women, young people — and for whom the thrill is now gone.

Why else would the Justice Department challenge the photo ID law in Texas? To charge Republicans with seeking to disenfranchise Hispanics and blacks, of course. But in 2008 the Supreme Court upheld a similar law from Indiana. And it wasn't close: 6-3, the majority including that venerated liberal, John Paul Stevens.

Moreover, photo IDs were recommended by the 2005 Commission on Federal Election Reform, co-chaired by Jimmy Carter. And you surely can't get into the attorney general's building without one. Are Stevens, Carter and Eric Holder anti-Hispanic and anti-black?

The ethnic bases covered, we proceed to the "war on women." It sprang to public notice when a 30-year-old student at an elite law school (starting private-sector salary upon graduation: $160,000) was denied the inalienable right to have the rest of the citizenry (as co-insured and/or taxpayers — median household income: $52,000) pay for her contraception.

No matter. Its sole purpose is to keep the war-on-women theme going, while the equally just-for-show Buffett Rule, nicely pitting the 99 percent versus the 1 percent, is a clever bit of class warfare designed to let Democrats play tribune of the middle class.

Ethnicity, race, gender, class. One more box to check: the young. Just four years ago, they swooned in the aisles for Obama. No longer. Not when 54 percent of college graduates under 25 are unemployed or underemployed.

How to shake them from their lethargy? Fear again. Tell them, as Obama repeatedly does, that Paul Ryan's budget would cut Pell Grants by $1,000 each, if his domestic cuts were evenly distributed. (They are not evenly distributed, making the charge a fabrication. But a great applause line.)

Then warn that Republicans would double the interest rate on student loans. Well, first, Mitt Romney has said he would keep them right where they are. Second, as The Washington Post points out, this is nothing but a recycled campaign gimmick from 2006 when Democrats advocated (and later passed) a 50 percent rate cut that gratuitously squanders student aid by subsidizing the wealthy as well as the needy.

For Obama, what's not to like? More beneficiaries, more votes.

What else to run on with 1.7 percent gross domestic product growth (2011), record long-term joblessness and record 8 percent-plus unemployment (38 consecutive months, as of this writing). Slice and dice, group against group.

There is a problem, however. It makes a mockery of Obama's pose as the great transcender, uniter, healer of divisions. This is the man who sprang from nowhere with that thrilling 2004 convention speech declaring that there is "not a black America and white America and Latino America and Asian America; there's the United States of America."

That was then. Today, we are just sects with quarrels — to be exploited for political advantage. And Obama is just the man to fulfill Al Gore's famous mistranslation of our national motto: Out of one, many.

Washington Post Writers Group

Charles Krauthammer is a syndicated columnist based in Washington, D.C..